Ninja Lore vs Reality
In popular lore today, ninjas are black-clad masked warriors who often scaled walls and killed people in feudal Japan. Many think of ninjas as covert killers, using exotic blades, throwing stars, and smoke bombs to carry out assassinations, all while locked in a feud with the more honorable samurai. In reality, such super cool ninjas never existed. The ones who did exist did not look or act like the popular perceptions of how ninjas looked and acted. For starters, ninjas did not wear black as a group uniform.
They had no greater predilection for black clothes than the average Japanese people of the period, among whom black clothes were extremely common. Ninjas were simply scouts, spies, and mercenaries, hired by various feudal Japanese armies. To carry out their tasks, they blended into the local population. They never used throwing stars. However, they did throw poisoned darts known as bo shurikens. They did not have a blood feud with samurai. Indeed, there was nothing to prevent a samurai from being a ninja, and quite a few ninjas were actually samurai.
